About

The Lemon Bucket Orkestra is Canada's only balkan-klezmer-gypsy-party-punk-super-band. Born on the streets of Toronto as a busking band in 2010, the original quartet of guerrilla-folk troubadours quickly amassed a battalion of troops armed with brass and bows and started touring the world. LBO has been nominated for several awards, heralded as ground-breaking by international media, and has performed at international festivals across the globe, but their greatest achievement is their ability to embody the dynamic space between "home" and "exotic" and to welcome audiences into the celebration of that space.

LBO's members have even gone as far as the eastern front of the war in Ukraine, using their music as catharsis, support, and even a platform for storytelling and information sharing in a political arena obfuscated by propaganda and misinformation. Their most recent performance project, Counting Sheep, is an interactive video-music-theatre-dinner-play that tells the story of the Maidan Revolution through traditional central and eastern Ukrainian choral songs and welcomes audience members to feel what band-members Mark Marczyk and Marichka Kudriavtseva felt when the protests in Kyiv escalated and snipers opened fire just over a year ago.

Their new album, Moorka, was recorded in a friend's barn in Waterloo right after their 3-month Canadian tour and was released in March 2015. It will include re-worked folk songs the band learned in Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, and Macedonia from local virtuosos on their last European tour, each tune spiked with a unique blend of funk, punk, psychadelia, blues and swing to give it that now infamous LBO momentum. Moorka was nominated for a 2016 Juno Award, and won a Canadian Folk Music award for "Best World Music Album". Lemon Bucket Orkestra was also given the title of "Best Band in Toronto" in NOW Magazine's 2015 "Best of Toronto" issue.